Nobody added a headcount for this. If your creative queue feels heavier than it did two years ago and you cannot quite point to why, it is not one thing. It is five, arriving at the same time, none of which showed up as a line item on anyone’s org chart.
Retail media is the biggest of them. It is advertising bought directly on a retailer’s own properties: sponsored placements across Amazon, Kroger, and Walmart’s sites and apps, plus the offsite and in-store inventory those networks now sell alongside it. It is the fastest growing line in CPG advertising, and for most in-house teams it arrived without a conversation about who would produce all of it.
Then private label volume, an AI payoff that has not landed, a 2028 labeling deadline, and more of this work staying in-house. Below is what each one costs you in production hours, and four things you can do about it this quarter.
The number that matters
CPG brands now put roughly 39% of total ad spend into retail media networks. In 2026, US retail media network spend will hit $69.33 billion, up 17.8-17.9% year over year, according to eMarketer. Total CPG ad spend, by contrast, is growing just 4.6%. Retail media is expanding roughly four times faster than the budget it sits inside. Skai’s analysis of the space corroborates the same trend line, and Bain & Company puts the broader retail media category on pace to grow 12% annually to roughly $140 billion by 2026, on a trajectory Bain expects to reach 30% of total digital marketing spend within two to three years, and 50% by 2030.
This isn’t a channel that plateaus once brands “figure it out.” Bain’s own read is that the top five networks, Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, Target’s Roundel, Instacart Ads, and Kroger Precision Marketing, will keep gaining share as more retailers stand up their own media arms. Every one of those five, plus whatever’s next, is a separate production pipeline with its own specs.
Why this specifically hits creative teams, not just media budgets
This is the part that doesn’t show up in the spend charts: retail media doesn’t multiply your budget, it multiplies your asset count. Every network runs its own creative specifications, and they’re not close to interchangeable. Amazon’s ad specs call for logos and images across three separate aspect ratios (square, tall 1.91:1, and a 9:16 vertical crop) for a single component-based creative unit. Kroger, Walmart Connect, and Instacart each publish their own version of that rulebook: different file-naming conventions, different logo lockups, different packaging requirements, and their own rules about which brand assets can be reused as-is and which have to be rebuilt.
None of that is a creative decision. It’s re-cropping, re-packaging, and re-approving the same campaign concept for a fourth, fifth, and sixth retailer, each with a different technical spec and a different approval queue. That’s where the hours actually go, and it’s exactly the kind of work that doesn’t show up when someone upstream is estimating “how long will this campaign take.”
Private label is compounding it
At the same time, private label isn’t a side story anymore. US private label sales reached $330 billion in 2025, a 24% unit share and 23% dollar share of the total market, growing about three times faster than national brands, per Circana. For creative ops leaders on the national-brand side, that’s competitive pressure. For anyone touching private label production, it’s more SKUs, more packaging refreshes, more of everything that already eats a production calendar.
Retail media and private label are pulling from the same limited pool of creative hours. Neither is slowing down.
Three more pressures stacking on top
This wouldn’t be as tight a squeeze if AI had already closed the gap the way the industry keeps promising. It hasn’t, at least not yet: 75% of CPG and retail executives call AI a top strategic priority, but only 16.5% can point to a measurable return on it, and enterprise-wide deployment sits at just 7-10%, per Deloitte’s 2026 survey. The tools are being bought. The output gains haven’t landed at scale.
And packaging teams have a clock running. The FDA has set January 1, 2028 as the uniform compliance date for food labeling regulations, including a front-of-package nutrition labeling rule (FDA, Dec 2024; see also the FDA’s front-of-package labeling page, May 2025). Compliant packaging for a 2028 deadline needs to be in production through 2027, on top of everything else already on the calendar.
None of this is landing on an outside agency by default, either. As of the most recent full benchmark, 82% of ANA members run an in-house agency, up from 78% in 2018. That’s a 2023 figure and a bit dated, but the direction is clear: this volume is increasingly staying in-house, on the same team that was already stretched before retail media took off.
The gap has a human cost, not just a production one
None of this is abstract to the people doing the work. It’s worth naming plainly: this is the kind of demand curve that burns teams out. Marketing Week’s 2025 Career and Salary Survey of more than 3,500 UK marketers found that 50.8% had experienced emotional exhaustion in the past year and 58.1% felt overwhelmed. Not a retail media number, and not a CPG one, but it’s the backdrop every creative ops leader is managing against while the volume keeps climbing.
What to actually do with this
You can’t out-hire this gap. Most budgets won’t allow it, and even if headcount were approved today, hiring and onboarding takes longer than the next retail media push will wait for. The teams handling this well aren’t adding people, they’re changing how demand hits the team in the first place. Four things worth doing in the next quarter, in order:
- Split retail media into its own production stream, with its own numbers. Right now, retail media work is probably absorbed into whatever brand campaign it’s attached to, which means nobody can see its true cost. Pull it out as a distinct category in your project tracking: how many retail media requests came through last quarter, from which networks, and how many hours they actually took versus what was budgeted. That single change does two things. It lets you staff and sequence retail media work deliberately instead of reactively, and it gives you the baseline you need for the next step.
- Turn that data into a capacity model your CMO can act on. A capacity model doesn’t need to be complicated: current headcount and hours available per week, against current demand and hours required, broken out by channel (brand campaigns, retail media, packaging, etc). Once retail media is its own line from step one, you can show, in one view, exactly how much of the gap is coming from that one channel specifically, not “the team feels slammed,” but “retail media alone added X hours a month against zero added capacity.” That reframes the conversation from a complaint into a resourcing decision, and it’s the version of this argument that gets budget approved, because it hands your CMO a number instead of a feeling.
- Build one structured intake path for retail media requests, before you build anything else. Most of the hours in Amazon’s, Kroger’s, and Walmart Connect’s respective specs aren’t creative judgment calls, they’re mechanical: which aspect ratios, which file-naming convention, which logo lockup, which zip structure. That’s exactly the kind of work that’s cheap to templatize and expensive to keep doing by hand every single time. A standardized intake form that captures the retailer, the required specs, and the deadline up front, tied to a checklist per network, removes the back-and-forth where a request comes in incomplete, sits until someone clarifies it, then gets rushed. Fixing intake is almost always the fastest lever in a creative operation, because it removes hours that were never adding creative value in the first place.
- Put a real date on the FOP labeling work, and treat it like a production deadline, not a compliance footnote. January 1, 2028 sounds far off until you count backward: final packaging art needs legal, regulatory, and brand sign-off before it goes to print, print needs lead time, and any packaging redesign work will be competing for the same creative hours as everything above. If your team hasn’t mapped which SKUs need front-of-package changes and when that work needs to start, that’s a concrete task to assign this quarter, not next year. Treat it the way you’d treat any hard external deadline with legal exposure attached, because that’s what it is.
None of this makes the volume disappear. What it does is move the burden from your team’s evenings and weekends onto a process that was actually designed to carry it, and gives you the visibility to make the case for more support when you do need it.
Steps 1 through 3 above, tracking demand by channel, building a real capacity view, and standardizing intake, are exactly the coordination problem RoboHead was built to solve for in-house CPG creative teams: one system to see what’s actually coming in, route it correctly the first time, and show, in hard numbers, where the team’s time is really going.
